be the first to know
made as an experiment by Tadas Paplauskas.
The idea was to create a twitter "client" for people who do not want to use twitter. I've tried twitter several times and it never sticked with me - it seemed to require too much upkeep to shape your feed into something truly informative and useful. I'm sure I'm not the only one. However, I was amazed by the sheer amount of information passing through the network every day. Surely it could be molded into something useful for news reporting (or at least signaling)?
The main challenge was to tame the wild stream of twitter. I cannot say that I was as successful as I had hoped, but with a few months of (ongoing) fine tuning I've managed to filter out at least 80% of garbage and broadcast (mostly) somewhat interesting trends. So yeah, if something BIG starts to happen in the world (or at least twittersphere), expect to get a notification in an hour or so.
Oh, and this is entirely free. At least while I can keep the lights on myself.